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I don't think its possible not to be impressed by Mr Oliver. Superb storytelling and each tale has a satisfying conclusion. I look forward to his next collection.
“We all carry our own shadows. They run by our side when we are young; they creep behind us when we are old; they sleep with us in the grave. We must learn to live and die with them.” - Reggie OliverI’ve known about Oliver for a while but and his reputation as a modern M.R. James but I foolishly put off reading his collections properly until this year but I’m so glad I finally did because his stories are not just absolutely brilliant but also far more readable than I ever expected and not trying...
Note: Actual score would be more like 3.5, but Reggie Oliver nearly always warrants the rounding up. Reggie Oliver is probably the greatest thing to happen to contemplative ghost(ly) stories since the passing of Robert Aickman, and if you were to rank the post-M.R. James masters it is pretty hard to imagine that any list would not feature him somewhere high up. He is a writer who succeeds in blurring the line between something mostly lost in our modern letters (a kind of Victorian/Edwardian gent...
Oliver strikes somewhere between M.R. James and Robert Aickman. His stories are not usually as enigmatic as Aickman but are often more than a clever entertainment like James. This is a solid 5 star collection that will not disappoint. Even the sentimental doesn’t become sappy. And oh can they be frightening.Oliver is one of the few writers of “traditional” horror stories who seems to hearken back to what I call the classic era of the horror story; the kind you would see in Twilight Zone magazine...
A very well-written collection of British ghost stories, that reminded me of the work of M.R. James and Robert Aickman.
This is a less dazzling collection than The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini, but there are some splendid stories in it, and Oliver is consistently entertaining."Among the Tombs" defies the odds by making something genuinely disturbing out of the hackneyed subject of demonic possession; "The Babe of the Abyss" and "A Nightmare Sang" are also excellent, and the latter has some fine Jamesian moments.In three pieces, "Lapland Nights", "The Skins", and "The Blue Room", Oliver tries his hand at the trick...
You know, I've always been more of a short story reader than a novel reader. Yeah, I'm that oddball. I'm also much more of a short story writer than I am a novel writer. Maybe it has something to do with attention spans. But I think I just like the brain-juicing rush I get from a really great short story, whether reading or writing. Cheap thrills? Maybe. But they're my cheap thrills!Problem is, short story collections are really difficult to review. Say too much about each story and it's really
My favorites so far remind me of the best Aickman stories (the title story, "Lapland Nights", and "Parma Violets"), where events are simply presented and interpretations are left open. "Parma Violets" for example has only the barest hints of the crux of the narrative (the relationship between the uncle and the nephew); otherwise it seems totally thin and inconsequential.I'm not so fond of the pieces where Oliver has more respect for horror conventions, like "The Time of Blood". The "payoff" is n...
I think one's reaction to this will depend on what you're expecting. If you want a decent, Aickman-esque strange tale that leaves you wondering, there's several stories here right up your alley. Want something in the vein of a M.R. Jamesian chiller? Expect perhaps even more of this. That said, this is a fairly long book (too long?), with 16 stories it's likely you'll enjoy some of them. But in terms of horror, Oliver rarely "goes for it," he tries to achieve more subtle effects. These stories ar...
I'd like to live this book but some of the stories were just OK. Some, though, are great. The title piece is great.
7/10
Lapland Nights alone is worth five stars along with the title and several others. Tales like The Blue Room, on the other hand, despite its promising approach (A room that causes sexual arousal to his occupants!) leave me, paradoxically, a bit cold.
A very exceptional writer. I try not to read all of his stories in each collection at once. This is one to savour.
A few months ago i read Reggie Olver's The Flowers of the Sea in a horror anthology. I consider that story to be one of the finest short stories published in the 2010s; a perfectly macabre tale that pulls in literary influence from some obvious sources—Lovecraft, Poe, and du Maurier specifically, but it even feels like a little bit of Stephen King is present—while tonally feeling more cinematic, more like a Nicolas Roeg or Andrzej Zulawski film. It's a pitch perfect horror story, focusing primar...
Yes, the title is awesome. Happily, so are the contents in Reggie Oliver's second collection of strange stories. Rooted firmly in the classic English ghost story tradition of M.R. James, E.F. Benson and others, Oliver's stories are storytelling at its best.The tone is conversational, the writing witty and eloquent; appropriately, the narrators are often unreliable, usually completely unhinged. Consider the title story, where a man purchases a boxed set of the symphonies of Adolf Hitler at a reco...
